As we head into late-Spring, with both temperature and wind condition increasing wildfire risk, PG&E will be enabling Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings (EPSS) on circuits in High Fire Risk Areas (HFRA). Our community is in an HFRA or shares electric distribution circuits with places in those higher risk areas (https://vizmap.ss.pge.com/). As such, customers may notice outages classified as “EPSS outages” from now through late fall 2025.
How do these settings work?
- The sensitivity settings are adjusted on all lines in HFRA’s, so that if an object falls or comes into contact with an EPSS enabled line, it causes a fault (outage) and immediately shuts off the line.
What happens during an EPSS outage:
During one of these outages PG&E will:
- Dispatch a crew
- Patrol the affected circuit (by foot, helicopter or drone)
- Identify and conduct any needed repairs
- Conduct safety tests
- Restore affected customers
What is PG&E doing to reduce the impact of these outages in my community?
- Teams at PG&E assess and work to identify the cause of every EPSS outage, on a daily basis.
- PG&E continues to invest in reliability tools like; sectionalizing devices, gridscope, and other emerging technologies.
- PG&E continues to invest in Undergrounding and Covered Lines.